Expected to hit the market sometime during Q1 2015

Among the many companies strutting their stuff at this year’s Blizzcon was computer peripheral maker Rosewill. Maximum PC Online Managing Editor Jimmy Thang visited the company’s booth at the Anaheim Convention Center to find out what exactly they were up to and found them parading a couple of upcoming products: the all new Viper ATX mid-tower chassis and the RGM 1100 gaming mouse, the successor to the RGM 1000 laser gaming rodent.

Heroes of the Storm is an upcoming MOBA title

In April, Parametric Sound Corporation’s gaming audio brand Turtle Beach announced a multi-year licensing deal with Blizzard Entertainment around the gaming bellwether’s upcoming freemium MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) title Heroes of the Storm. That partnership has led to the creation of the Turtle Beach Ear Force Heroes of the Storm Gaming headset, which the peripheral maker happily showed us during Blizzcon 2014.

A Siberia Elite Prism with WoW branding

With the much-anticipated release of Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion pack to World of Warcraft, just around the corner, the just-concluded Blizzcon 2014 gaming convention came as a great opportunity for gaming peripheral manufacturer SteelSeries to tout its Siberia Elite World of Warcraft Edition headset, and that is precisely what the company did. On Friday, our Online Managing Editor Jimmy Thang stopped by the company’s booth at Anaheim Convention Center to check out the headset on behalf of all you Maximum PC readers.

New driver boosts performance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

A new "GeForce Game Ready" driver is available for GeForce GPU owners. Baked into the 344.60 WHQL release are tweaks intended to improve performance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, along with updates to the PhysX system software, HD audio driver, CUDA, and GeForce experience. Beyond that, there are a bunch of new and/or updated application profiles, 3D Vision profiles, and 3D compatibility mode support.

New gaming records revealed

According to the Guinness World Records 2015 Gamer's Edition that comes out tomorrow, Google's Pac-Man themed Doodle was played for 500 million hours, distracting office workers and costing businesses an estimated £85 million (around $135 million in U.S. currency) in lost productivity. On the mobile front, Rovio's Angry Birds title forever holds the record as the first game to reach 1 billion downloads.

It's all about the buttons

We don't envy PC gaming peripheral makers trying to come up with new ways of differentiating their products from a crowded field of gear, but lest any of them think about throwing in the white flag, Logitech proved there are still new angles to exploit. How so? Logitech's new G302 Daedalus Prime MOBA gaming mouse wields a metal spring tensioning system that's supposed to improve left and right click responsiveness.

Gaming DNA comes to the forefront

HP isn't doing much with its Voodoo brand these days, but at the same time, it hasn't completely forgotten about gamers. Witness the new HP Omen, a svelte gaming laptop designed to handle triple-A titles without all the bulk of a desktop replacement. It has a 15.6-inch IPS display with a Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) resolution that's powered by an Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor, 8GB of DDR3L-1600 RAM, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics.

Holiday season offer applies to both console and bundles

Sony’s Playstation 4 has been continuously outselling Microsoft’s Xbox One ever since the two eighth generation consoles first went on sale in November 2013. Even Microsoft’s decision to offer the Xbox One sans the Kinect has been largely ineffective in reversing this trend. Things are so bad for Microsoft that during the latest quarter the PS4 comfortably outsold both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Under the circumstances, it is going to take something special from Microsoft to turn the corner during the holiday season.

Finally, a gaming laptop with a mechanical plank!

Call us keyboard snobs if you will, but once you've experienced the pleasure of typing on a mechanical keyboard, it's difficult to go back to those squishy membrane planks. Peripheral makers have stepped up to the plate with plenty of mechanical models in the past few years, though MSI gets a virtual high-five for being the first to plop a mechanical keyboard on a gaming laptop.

Finally, a new speaker option for PCs

Sometimes it feels like speaker makers have forgotten about PC gamers. Long gone are the days when multimedia speaker announcements were fairly common, but don't despair, not all companies have hightailed it out of the PC gaming space in a Klipsch-like fashion. Gaming peripheral maker Razer has been dabbling in audio and its newest product announcement is the Leviathan, a 5.1 channel Dolby surround sound bar for gaming and movies.